Something was wrong with the river.
Not broken. Just quiet.
Along the lower Yangtze, the water had gone the color of iron, and the wind had turned sharp enough to bite.
She was small, even for an alligator. About a metre and a half, nose to tail, dark and scaled, with bony plates set into her back and, strange for any alligator, into her belly too, like a second suit of armor nobody could see.
She was one of only two kinds of alligator anywhere on Earth. Far across an ocean, a much bigger cousin sunned itself in American swamps. Here, among the reeds and rice paddies of the lower Yangtze, she was the only kind anyone would ever meet.
That felt like plenty, most days.
Today it did not.
The cold was coming, and she felt it in the mud before she felt it in the air.
So she got to work.
Claws first. Then jaw. Then the long push of her whole body, turning earth, cutting a tunnel back into the bank where the water had carved a soft shoulder into the ground.
Deeper.
Then deeper again.
By the time the first true frost silvered the rice stalks, she was gone. Not dead. Not even asleep the whole time. Just elsewhere, curled in her burrow below the frozen top of the world, breathing slow, waiting out a season she had no wish to argue with.
Above her, the river iced at its edges.
Below her, very little happened at all, for months.
This was not new to her. This was simply what a Chinese alligator did, every year, for more than half of it. Snails, clams, small fish and smaller animals, all put away for later, all traded now for warmth she carried inside herself rather than outside.
Somewhere upriver, farmers told a story about a dragon that slept beneath the water and stirred the mud when it dreamed. Some people think that story began right here, with alligators exactly like her, vanishing into riverbanks every winter and returning every spring as if summoned.
She did not know she was anybody's dragon.
She only knew the mud had loosened, one morning, enough to let her through.
She pushed up through the roof of her own burrow into weak, real sunlight, and the river had gone soft and brown and full of noise again.
There were not many of her kind left in the wild. Perhaps only a few hundred, scattered along the last quiet stretches of a very old river. Thousands more grew up safe in breeding centres, waiting for rivers wild enough to hold them.
That summer, she built a mound of reeds and mud beside the water, laid her eggs inside it, and stayed close, guarding it the way her own mother once had.
Late in the season, before the shells had even opened, she heard them.
Small voices, calling from inside their eggs, asking to be let out into the world.
She was already listening.
She dug them free with claws built for exactly this, and the river, so quiet all winter, filled up again with new voices.
Somewhere upriver, a farmer swore he heard a dragon stir.
He was closer to the truth than he knew.